Data Point of the Week: AR Spending To Reach $36B in 2023

Annual spending on augmented reality will reach $36.4 billion in 2023, according to Greenlight Insights. That’s 11x the spending the firm projects for 2019.

AR spending is defined in the report as devices (headsets such as Hololens and Meta 2) and content (AR apps). The latter will be a bit of a wild card, and we’ll see signs of its growth in the coming months as developers have time to build and market apps with ARkit.

As we wrote last week, AR could add 9 billion to Apple’s software and services revenue by 2020. And that’s just apple, and just accounts for the 30 percent cut of app sales and in app purchases that it takes. So the actual spending on ARkit apps (including developers’ cut) will be greater.

As for hardware, Greenlight bases its spending projection on AR headsets reaching 30 million units sold annually by 2023. This is a bit more conservative than other forecasts we’ve see, which is a good thing. Several forecasts AR forecasts over the past year have been aggressive.

“We are expecting a faster adoption of AR headsets than what we have seen with virtual reality headsets,” Greenlight CEO Clifton Dawson said in a statement. “But optimism should be tempered as the AR ecosystem must address substantial problems on numerous base levels.”

For a deeper dive on AR & VR insights, see ARtillry’s new intelligence subscription, and sign up for the free ARtillry Weekly newsletter.

Disclosure: ARtillry has no financial stake in the companies mentioned in this post, nor received payment for its production. Disclosure and ethics policy can be seen here.